Monthly Archives May 2016

Yesterday, Argentina's president, Mauricio Macri, announced the much awaited renewable energy auction. Under the name of RenovAr, the program seeks to add 1 GW of energy from renewable sources in the coming years. On Thursday, the government published pre-bid documents for the first auction to take place in June. These documents do not spell out all of the terms for the auction, but clarify some important points, and open up the process to comments for potential participants. The final version of the auction terms will be published July 1 and bids will be due the 8 of August.
The first auction of the ...

Investment in renewable energy (RE) is on a healthy growth trajectory despite the slump in the price of oil, with developing countries taking an every greater share of it. According to the Trends in Private Sector Climate Finance report published at the end of 2015 by the Climate Change Support Team of the United Nations, global investment in RE projects increased by 55% from 2009-2014, and over 70% of it went to non-OECD countries. Another promising trend identified in the report is the decline in the perception of risk related to RE technologies, which is reducing the cost of financing and creating conditions for long-term and ...

One of the main goals of Mexico's energy reform is to make energy cheaper, thus improving the economy's productivity and the quality of life of Mexican citizens. The reform seeks to achieve this by introducing competition and market forces in a sector until recently monopolized by the government. The reforms passed in 2014 made drastic changes to the structure of hydrocarbon and electricity markets, introducing competitive bidding and a wholesale market for electricity that would force the retirement of older plants and their replacement by more efficient ones.
The benefits of these reforms, both in the price and quality of energy, cannot be ...